Despite a strategy to promote an inclusive culture in your organization, unconscious bias could be undermining your efforts. That is why some companies proactively address unconscious bias through training.

Take Praxair, Inc. This global industrial gas company worked with a third-party training vendor in Fall 2014 to create content for “Unconscious Bias to Conscious Inclusion,” a half-day training program offered to all Praxair leaders, says Vanessa Abrahams-John, chief diversity office for Praxair. “We started offering the training to help our managers understand how unconscious bias can derail our diversity talent management efforts and their decision-making processes. Further, the training was thought to help develop impactful and sustainable solutions for diverse talent management—specifically, in recruitment, development, and, ultimately, retention.”

Implicit bias is an unconscious preference for or an aversion to a person or a group of people. In other words, we may have an attitude toward others or stereotype them without conscious knowledge of what we’re doing. If we act in accordance with our implicit bias, we may be discriminating against a person or a group of people without even being aware of our bias. Two recent cases illustrate the fact that HR managers need to educate supervisors on implicit bias and how a seemingly straightforward description of an employee or a workplace incident can suggest racial animus and unconscious discrimination.

Employment laws prohibit intentional discrimination based on race, sex, or other protected characteristics as well as practices that have a discriminatory impact if they’re not supported by business necessity. Implicit or unconscious bias isn’t technically unlawful in the workplace if it doesn’t cause an unjustified adverse impact.

Yet a presidential candidate in the most-watched debate ever recently responded to a question about whether she “believed that police are implicitly biased against black people” by stating, “Implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.” The FBI director also recently acknowledged overwhelming research demonstrating the presence of widespread unconscious biases and the way in which those biases may manifest in policing.